...The Tariff Acts of 1861 [Cause of the Civil War & today]

It is now about one year since the first Tariff Act of 1861 was passed; it is almost one year since the Rebellion became a settled fact, and war was rendered inevitable by the bombardment of Fort Sumter. The time is a fitting one for a review of the effects of the passage of the former and the influence of the latter on the commerce and foreign trade of our country.

Several Freepers recently attacked me when I posted a response to a posted article comparing Obama to Lincoln. I stated that the Civil War was NOT over slavery but unconstitutional tariffs on the exports of cotton, and that Ft Sumter was a customs post collecting these tariffs in the Charleston Bay. This article from the archives of the New York Times appears to validate my contention.

The Civil War was about unconstitutional tariffs imposed by a centralized Federal power. It was about States Rights vs Centralized Federal power, exactly the issue between the Federalists of the Northeastern colonies (Hamilton, et al) and the States Rights advocates of the Southern states like Virginia (Jefferson, et al). Indeed, the fear of a centralized encroachment of power similar to King George, and such tariffs, was exactly the reason for the bicameral legislature.

It was the distrust of centralized federal government that prompted Jefferson to write:

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

Jefferson also wrote:

"A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference. "

The Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, was never meant for the protection of our homes, but for the protection of our freedoms from such a centralized Federal power encroaching upon them.

Without a doubt, the Second Amendment provided the cure intended by our Founding Fathers for what was happening at the time, the merchantile colonization of the Southern states exploiting their cotton resources at below market prices for Northeastern textile mills.

In those mills, "sweat shops", immigrant workers were literally worked to death, even children. Each wave of immigrants provided a new crop of dispendable human resources. While slavery is a reprehensible institution inconsistent with our Constitution, the "sweat shops" of the Northeast were much more cruel.

One well-documented study,"Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery", Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, 1974, Makes this case. Their chief conclusions were also neatly summarized in a list of 10 "principal corrections of the traditional characterization of the slave economy" (pp. 4-6).

1. Slavery was not a system irrationally kept in existence by owners who failed to perceive or were indifferent to their best economic interests. The purchase of a slave was generally a highly profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favorably with the most outstanding investment opportunities in manufacturing.

2. The slave system was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War. There is no evidence that economic forces alone would have soon brought slavery to an end without the necessity of a war or other form of political intervention. Quite the contrary; as the Civil War approached, slavery as an economic system was never stronger and the trend was toward even further entrenchment.

3. Slaveowners were not becoming pessimistic about the future of their system during the decade that preceded the Civil War. The rise of the secessionist movement coincided with a wave of optimism. On the eve of the Civil War, slaveholders anticipated an era of unprecedented prosperity.

4. Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture. Economies of large-scale operation, effective management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the northern system of family farming.

5. The typical slave field hand was not lazy, inept, and unproductive. On average he was harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.

6. The course of slavery in the cities does not prove that slavery was incompatible with an industrial system or that slaves were unable to cope with an industrial regimen. Slaves employed in industry compared favorably with free workers in diligence and efficiency. Far from declining, the demand for slaves was actually increasing more rapidly in urban areas than in the countryside.

7. The belief that slave-breeding, sexual exploitation, and promiscuity destroyed the black family is a myth. The family was the basic unit of social organization under slavery. It was to the economic interest of planters to encourage the stability of slave families and most of them did so. Most slave sales were either of whole families or of individuals who were at an age when it would have been normal for them to have left the family.

8. The material (not psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. This is not to say that they were good by modern standards. It merely emphasizes the hard lot of all workers, free or slave, during the first half of the nineteenth century.

9. Slaves were exploited in the sense that part of the income which they produced was expropriated by their owners. However, the rate of expropriation was much lower than has generally been presumed. Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90 percent of the income he produced.

10. Far from stagnating, the economy of the antebellum South grew quite rapidly. Between 1840 and 1860, per capita income increased more rapidly in the south than in the rest of the nation. By 1860 the south attained a level of per capita income which was high by the standards of the time. Indeed, a country as advanced as Italy did not achieve the same level of per capita income until the eve of World War II.

Lincoln rejected abolitionism until well into the Civil War when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This was done when the Union was losing the war, was having trouble recruiting trrops and attracting funds. 300,000 freed slaves joined Union forces, and Bostoniam abolitionist money flowed in. This move infused a new "moral" impetus to a lost cause.

Freeing the slaves was never a reason for the war. After all, the South seceded, the North did not attack to free the slaves. Why did the South secede? Tariffs and States Rights. They employed a Constitutional right when those in power over-reached the Constitution and encroached upon the rights of others.

Since that time Marxism has evolved in the movement for centralized power. Watch this current situation.

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, —a most sacred right—a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government, may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with , or neat about them, who may oppose their movement. Such minority, was precisely the case, of the Tories of our own revolution.” —Abraham Lincoln, from the Congressional Record, Jan. 12, 1847.

What Caused the Civil War?
Gettysburg National Military Park Kidzpage

http://www.nps.gov/archive/gett/gettkidz/cause.htm

(Fort Scott National Historic Site)
There were many reasons for a Civil War to happen in America, and political issues and disagreements began soon after the American Revolution ended in 1782. Between the years 1800 and 1860, arguments between the North and South grew more intense. One of the main quarrels was about taxes paid on goods brought into this country from foreign countries. This tax was called a tariff. Southerners felt these tariffs were unfair and aimed toward them because they imported a wider variety of goods than most Northern people. Taxes were also placed on many Southern goods that were shipped to foreign countries, an expense that was not always applied to Northern goods of equal value. An awkward economic structure allowed states and private transportation companies to do this, which also affected Southern banks that found themselves paying higher interest rates on loans made with banks in the North. The situation grew worse after several “panics”, including one in 1857 that affected more Northern banks than Southern. Southern financiers found themselves burdened with high payments just to save Northern banks that had suffered financial losses through poor investment.

In the years before the Civil War the political power in the Federal government, centered in Washington, D.C., was changing. Northern and mid-western states were becoming more and more powerful as the populations increased. Southern states lost political power because the population did not increase as rapidly. As one portion of the nation grew larger than another, people began to talk of the nation as sections. This was called sectionalism. Just as the original thirteen colonies fought for their independence almost 100 years earlier, the Southern states felt a growing need for freedom from the central Federal authority in Washington. Southerners believed that state laws carried more weight than Federal laws, and they should abide by the state regulations first. This issue was called State’s Rights and became a very warm topic in congress.

CAUSES OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

http://www.nps.gov/archive/gett/getteducation/bcast01/gcast-2.htm

After the Constitution was adopted in 1789, creating one nation, differences between the states were worked out through compromises. By 1861 the following differences between the Northern States (which include the Mid-western and Western States) and the Southern States had become so great that compromise would no longer work. Thus, a conflict started within our nation that was called the Civil War.

Tariffs- For more than 40 years, arguments between the North and South had been growing. One of these quarrels was about taxes paid on goods brought into this country from foreign countries. This kind of tax is called a tariff. In 1828, Northern businessmen urged passage of the “Tariff Act”. The purpose of the law was to encourage the manufacture of products in the United States, and to encourage the South to buy these products from the North instead of from Europe or pay more to get goods from the North. Either way, the Southern people were forced to pay more because of the efforts of Northern businessmen. Though most tariff laws had been changed by the time of the Civil War, the Southern people still remembered how they had been treated by the Northern people, especially the business class.

States Rights- In the years before the Civil War, the balance of political power in the Federal Government, centered in Washington, D.C., was changing. The Northern and Mid-Western States were becoming more and more powerful as their population increased. This meant that the Southern States were losing political power in the Federal government and southern politicians felt that their interests were not being served. Westward expansion was also considered a risk to southern interests, as Federal authority appeared to subdue the desires of people living in those territorial states. Just as the original thirteen colonies fought for independence almost 90 years earlier, southern states felt a growing need for freedom from the central Federal government. They felt that each state should make its own laws and govern itself without Federal interference. This issue was called “States Rights”. Some Southern States wanted to secede, or break away, from the United States of America and govern themselves and it was a hot issue right up to the presidential elections in 1860.

Slavery- Another quarrel between the North and the South, and perhaps the most emotional one, was over the issue of slavery. Agriculture was the South’s primary industry and cotton the primary farm product. Not having the use of machines, it took a great amount of human labor to pick cotton. A large number of slaves were used to provide labor. Many slaves were also used to provide labor for the various household chores that needed to be done. Many Northerners thought that owning slaves was wrong, for any reason and they loudly disagreed with the South’s laws and beliefs concerning slavery. Yet slavery had been a part of the American way of life for over 200 years. The Constitution of the United States of America guaranteed the right to own property and protected it against seizure, or take-over. A slave was property in the eyes of many. The people of the Southern States did not like the Northern people telling them that owning a slave was a great wrong and were disappointed that northern governments did not pursue, capture, and return fugitive slaves who escaped to the North despite the passage of a Federal law in 1850. A person believed that slavery was either right or wrong, so how could two people arguing over such an issue compromise?

CLOSE-UP CORNER: Pick one of the causes of the Civil War to research and learn more about. Present information to the class in the form of a bulletin board display.

Election of Abraham Lincoln- Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States in 1860. He vowed to keep the country united and the new western territories free from slavery. Despite Lincoln’s promise to not interfere with slavery in the South, many Southerners were afraid that he was not sympathetic to their way of life and would not treat them fairly. Lincoln’s personal and political views of slavery were evolving, but at this point he was primarily concerned with keeping the United States together as one nation.

Secession- South Carolina was the first state to secede, or break away, from the United States soon after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Six other states quickly followed and also seceded. These states joined together and formed a new nation which they named the Confederate States of America and Jefferson Davis was elected the Confederacy’s first president. On April 12, 1861 the Confederate States of America bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina, which was held by Federal (Union) troops and flew the United States flag. As open conflict increased, other states seceded and joined the Confederacy. The fighting of the Civil War had begun.

Causes of the Civil War
by Randy Golden
http://ngeorgia.com/history/why.html

...and they [Yankees] are marked ... with such a perversity of character, as to constitute, from that circumstance, the natural division of our parties
Thomas Jefferson

Some say simplistically that the Civil War was fought over slavery. Unfortunately, there is no “simple” reason. The causes of the war were a complex series of events, including slavery, that began long before the first shot was fired. Competing nationalisms, political turmoil, the definition of freedom, the preservation of the Union, the fate of slavery and the structure of our society and economy could all be listed as significant contributing factors in America’s bloodiest conflict.

Complaints of Georgians

Many of the problems Georgians saw more than one hundred fifty years ago are being reiterated today. The “oppressive” federal government. High taxes(tariffs before the war). A growing government unwilling to listen to law abiding citizens. Sound familiar? They were complaints levied from 1816 on in Georgia.

Constitutional Questions

People argued about the meaning of the Constitution since its infancy. From a legal standpoint, the document defines the relationship between the people of the United States and the federal government, detailing the powers and responsibilities of each. In 1828 Vice-president John C. Calhoun said if a state felt a federal law extended beyond the Constitutional rights of the government that state had the right to ignore(or “nullify”) the law. This concept dated back the Articles of Confederation. President Andrew Jackson felt the federal government was the highest authority(Article VI, Section 2) and the states had to abide by its law.

Tariffs and the Nullification Crisis

As industry in the North expanded it looked towards southern markets, rich with cash from the lucrative agricultural business, to buy the North’s manufactured goods. However, it was often cheaper for the South to purchase the goods abroad. In order to “protect” the northern industries Jackson slapped a tariff on many of the imported goods that could be manufactured in the North. When South Carolina passed the Ordinance of Nullification in November 1832, refusing to collect the tariff and threatening to withdraw from the Union, Jackson ordered federal troops to Charleston. A secession crisis was averted when Congress revised the Tariff of Abominations in February 1833.

The rhetoric changes

However, the political climate changed during this “Nullification Crisis.” Designations of States Rightist, Pro-Union, loose or strict constructionalist became more important than Whig or Democrat. In North Georgia when John Thomas, a local politician, was asked what to name a new county he said, “Name it Union, for none but Union-like men live here.” Most of the northern tier of Georgia counties remained pro-Union until the outbreak of war almost 30 years later. From this point on factional politics would play an increasing part in the division of a country.

Economic changes affect society

The Panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression began to gnaw like a hungry animal on the flesh of the American system. The disparity between northern and southern economies was exacerbated. Before and after the depression the economy of the South prospered. Southern cotton sold abroad totaled 57% of all American exports before the war. The Panic of 1857 devastated the North and left the South virtually untouched. The clash of a wealthy, agricultural South and a poorer, industrial North was intensified by abolitionists who were not above using class struggle to further their cause.

The breakdown of the political system

The ugliness of the political process quickly began to show as parties turned upon themselves and politics on a national level were more like local Georgia politics. Feuds and fights in political arenas were common. From 1837 until 1861 eight men became president, but no man served more than a single term in office. One sitting president was not renominated by his own party and another withdrew his name after being nominated. New political parties were created with names like Constitutional Union, American, Free-Soilers and Republican. In Georgia, Democrats were strong, but factional fighting broke the party along pro-Union and States Rights lines.

With the disintegration of the Whig party in the early 1850’s the political turmoil increased. Howell Cobb, former Speaker of the House, molded pro-Union Democrats, mostly from North Georgia, with former Whigs to grab the governorship in 1851. His attempts to help slaves fell on the deaf ears of our state legislature. Although Georgia began to prosper during his first year the coalition fell apart as the Democrats reunited. The increasing power of the West and self-serving politicians like Stephen A. Douglas churned the political environment as the North and South battled for philosophic control.

By the time Buchanan was elected(1856) the country was divided on many issues, including slavery. Former Governor Cobb spoke in the North as a moderate Southerner for Buchanan and served on his cabinet. Over the next 4 years Cobb changed from pro-Union to secessionist. A similar process occurred across much of Georgia. In 1860 the state was equally divided between secessionist and pro-Union.

A concise history of slavery

At Jamestown, Va. in 1611 a group of Scottish women and children were sold as slaves. 7 years later in Jamestown the first Africans were sold in slavery. From 1611 until 1865 people from virtually every society on earth were sold into slavery in North America. Citizens in each of the thirteen colonies enslaved people, but slavery was viewed as a southern institution after the early 1800’s. Along the coastal areas of the South a majority of the slaves were black. In some inland areas whites and Native Americans outnumbered black slaves. Slavery is still legal in the United States as a criminal punishment, but is not practiced.

In 1789 Georgians, as did much of the rest of the country, saw slavery as a dying institution. Eli Whitney’s stolen modification of the cotton gin(1793) created a greater demand for slaves, so rather than “wither on the vine” the institution prospered. The Northwest Ordinance, adopted in 1787 banned the practice in the Northwest Territories. In 1798 Georgia forbid further importation of slaves and the Constitution allowed Congress to outlaw importation of slaves in 1808, which they did. Over the next 40 years lesser skirmishes were fought over slavery including the Compromise of 1820. In North Georgia slavery was not widespread and a majority of the slaves were of Native American, Scottish or Irish descent.

Slaves often spoke of “our cotton” or “our cattle”. The only item they would concede was the master’s carriage. Trusted slaves were permitted to go to town unescorted. Others suffered horribly. Conditions in northern factories were as bad or worse than those for a majority of the slaves, but it would be 40 years after the war when they were properly addressed.

Beginning in the late 1840’s the conflict over slavery began to boil over. The Compromise of 1850 contributed heavily to the split in Georgia’s Democratic Party. On a national scale David Wilmot, Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe enflamed the abolitionists. James G. Birney and Theodore Weld were more effective against slavery. The Dred Scot decision, Kansas-Nebraska Act, and harsher Fugitive Slave Laws gave the South some redress.

The new Republican Party became a home to the alienated abolitionists. Although they totaled less than 3% of the population at large, they formulated the Republican platform to include the abolition of slavery as a plank. The party then nominated Abraham Lincoln for president. Few gave him any chance of success, but 3 other candidates split the popular vote and Lincoln won. Convinced that Lincoln would ruin the South economically, possibly by freeing the slaves, the heartland of the South withdrew from the Union. Shortly thereafter the upper south joined them. The attack on Fort Sumter launched America’s bloodiest conflict.

So what caused the war?

The United States had been moving towards a fractured, divisive society for a number of years. Cultural and economic differences served to widen the rift. Battles among North, South, and West grew more heated, especially after 1850. Politicians and the judiciary sent conflicting signals trying to appease each of the groups involved, yet all remained dissatisfied. Georgians saw a federal government controlled by Northern industrialists who were unresponsive to the problems of their state. Tariffs paid by Georgians bought improvements in northern and western states. Now the federal government, they thought, was going to take away personal property without compensation, a clear violation of their Fourth Amendment rights.

The South was wrong to assume Lincoln intended to free the slaves. He had never advocated action to abolish slavery nor did he speak out against the Illinois rules prohibiting blacks from testifying against whites. The true abolition candidate, Gerrit Smith of New York drew few votes. In his inaugural address Lincoln made it clear he would not interfere with slavery where it existed. Even though he made this speech after the South seceded he left the door open for their return.

Genesis of the Civil War
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/civilwar.html

The historical event that looms largest in American public consciousness is the Civil War. One-hundred thirty-nine years after the first shot was fired, its genesis is still fiercely debated and its symbols heralded and protested. And no wonder: the event transformed the American regime from a federalist system based on freedom to a centralized state that circumscribed liberty in the name of public order. The cataclysmic event massacred a generation of young men, burned and looted the Southern states, set a precedent for executive dictatorship, and transformed the American military from a citizen-based defense corps into a global military power that can’t resist intervention.

And yet, if you listen to the media on the subject, you might think that the entire issue of the Civil War comes down to race and slavery. If you favor Confederate symbols, it means you are a white person unsympathetic to the plight of blacks in America. If you favor abolishing Confederate History Month and taking down the flag, you are an enlightened thinker willing to bury the past so we can look forward to a bright future under progressive leadership. The debate rarely goes beyond these simplistic slogans.

And yet this take on the event is wildly ahistorical. It takes Northern war propaganda at face value without considering that the South had solid legal, moral, and economic reasons for secession which had nothing to do with slavery. Even the name “Civil War” is misleading, since the war wasn’t about two sides fighting to run the central government as in the English or Roman civil wars. The South attempted a peaceful secession from federal control, an ambition no different from the original American plea for independence from Britain.

But why would the South want to secede? If the original American ideal of federalism and constitutionalism had survived to 1860, the South would not have needed to. But one issue loomed larger than any other in that year as in the previous three decades: the Northern tariff. It was imposed to benefit Northern industrial interests by subsidizing their production through public works. But it had the effect of forcing the South to pay more for manufactured goods and disproportionately taxing it to support the central government. It also injured the South’s trading relations with other parts of the world.

In effect, the South was being looted to pay for the North’s early version of industrial policy. The battle over the tariff began in 1828, with the “tariff of abomination.” Thirty year later, with the South paying 87 percent of federal tariff revenue while having their livelihoods threatened by protectionist legislation, it became impossible for the two regions to be governed under the same regime. The South as a region was being reduced to a slave status, with the federal government as its master.

But why 1860? Lincoln promised not to interfere with slavery, but he did pledge to “collect the duties and imposts”: he was the leading advocate of the tariff and public works policy, which is why his election prompted the South to secede. In pro-Lincoln newspapers, the phrase “free trade” was invoked as the equivalent of industrial suicide. Why fire on Ft. Sumter? It was a customs house, and when the North attempted to strengthen it, the South knew that its purpose was to collect taxes, as newspapers and politicians said at the time.

To gain an understanding of the Southern mission, look no further than the Confederate Constitution. It is a duplicate of the original Constitution, with several improvements. It guarantees free trade, restricts legislative power in crucial ways, abolishes public works, and attempts to rein in the executive. No, it didn’t abolish slavery but neither did the original Constitution (in fact, the original protected property rights in slaves).

Before the war, Lincoln himself had pledged to leave slavery intact, to enforce the fugitive slaves laws, and to support an amendment that would forever guarantee slavery where it then existed. Neither did he lift a finger to repeal the anti-Negro laws that besotted all Northern states, Illinois in particular. Recall that the underground railroad ended, not in New York or Boston-since dropping off blacks in those states would have been restricted-but in Canada! The Confederate Constitution did, however, make possible the gradual elimination of slavery, a process that would have been made easier had the North not so severely restricted the movements of former slaves.

Now, you won’t read this version of events in any conventional history text, particularly not those approved for use in public high schools. You are not likely to hear about it in the college classroom either, where the single issue of slavery overwhelms any critical thinking. Again and again we are told what Polybius called “an idle, unprofitable tale” instead of the truth, and we are expected to swallow it uncritically. So where can you go to discover that the conventional story is sheer nonsense?

The last ten years have brought us a flurry of great books that look beneath the surface. There is John Denson’s The Costs of War (1998), Jeffrey Rodgers Hummel’s Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996), David Gordon’s Secession, State, and Liberty (1998), Marshall de Rosa’s The Confederate Constitution (1991), or, from a more popular standpoint, James and Walter Kennedy’s Was Jefferson Davis Right? (1998).

But if we were to recommend one work-based on originality, brevity, depth, and sheer rhetorical power-it would be Charles Adams’s time bomb of a book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). In a mere 242 pages, he shows that almost everything we thought we knew about the war between the states is wrong.

Adams believes that both Northern and Southern leaders were lying when they invoked slavery as a reason for secession and for the war. Northerners were seeking a moral pretext for an aggressive war, while Southern leaders were seeking a threat more concrete than the Northern tariff to justify a drive to political independence. This was rhetoric designed for mass consumption . Adams amasses an amazing amount of evidence-including remarkable editorial cartoons and political speeches-to support his thesis that the war was really about government revenue.

Consider this little tidbit from the pro-Lincoln New York Evening Post, March 2, 1861 edition:

“That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop.

“What, then, is left for our government? Shall we let the seceding states repeal the revenue laws for the whole Union in this manner? Or will the government choose to consider all foreign commerce destined for those ports where we have no custom-houses and no collectors as contraband, and stop it, when offering to enter the collection districts from which our authorities have been expelled?”

This is not an isolated case. British newspapers, whether favoring the North or South, said the same thing: the feds invaded the South to collect revenue. Indeed, when Karl Marx said the following, he was merely stating what everyone who followed events closely knew: “The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty.”

Marx was only wrong on one point: the war was about principle at one level. It was about the principle of self-determination and the right not to be taxed to support an alien regime. Another way of putting this is that the war was about freedom, and the South was on the same side as the original American revolutionaries.

Interesting, isn’t it, that today, those who favor banning Confederate symbols and continue to demonize an entire people’s history also tend to be partisans of the federal government in all its present political struggles? Not much has changed in 139 years. Adams’s book goes a long way toward telling the truth about this event, for anyone who cares to look at the facts.

May 11, 2000

My response interspersed below at *

1. The quality of a slave’s life is a side issue used by apologetics. Slavery is wrong. The quality of life that they had previously is inconsequential.

* You obviously missed my assertion that slavery is wrong. I think the word you are looking for is “irrelevant”, not “inconsequential”. The relevance was that the South has been demonized for the institution of slavery, in a very cruel period of time where the North was much more brutal, Europe was worse, and these were the “civilized” nations.

2. If slavery was not a key issue, why is it mentioned in the documents legally pronouncing the secession, and why did Lincoln run on an abolitionist platform? Indeed, the entire purpose of the Republican party at its inception was to bring about an abolitionist country. Attention, scholarly and relevant quote ahead:

* Where did the war start? Ft Sumter. Why were shots fired? It had nothing to do with slaves. Lincoln did NOT support abolition. While emotions were high about slavery & it waqs mentioned in the articles of secession, the CAUSE was tariffs.

On May 26, 1860, one of the Republican party’s leading orators, Carl Schurz of Wisconsin, addressed a Milwaukee audience which had gathered to endorse the nomination of Abraham Lincoln. “The Re publicans,” Schurz declared, “stand before the country, not only as the anti-slavery party, but emphatically as the party of free labor.” Two weeks later, Richard Yates, the gubernatorial candidate in Illinois, spoke at a similar rally in Springfield. “The great idea and basis of the Republican party, as I understand it,” he proclaimed, “is free labor. . . . To make labor honorable is the object and aim of the Republican party.”1 Such statements, which were reiterated countless times by Republican orators in the 1850’s, were more than mere election-year appeals for the votes of laboring men. For the concept of “free labor” lay at the heart of the Republican ideology, and expressed a coherent social outlook, a model of the good society. Political anti-slavery was not merely a negative doctrine, an attack on southern slavery and the society built upon it; it was an affirmation of the superiority of the social system of the North—a dynamic, expanding capitalist society, whose achievements and destiny were almost wholly the result of the dignity and opportunities which it offered the average laboring man.

* So?

I keep this on my home page every time the South rises again.
I figure it is hard to argue with the reasoning of the leaders of the Confederacy:

I will enshrine the following from the message to the Confederate Congress April 29th 1861 from Jefferson Davis:

” As soon as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in the Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure the tenure of property in slaves... Senators and Representatives were sent to the common councils of the nation, whose chief title to this distinction consisted in the display of a spirit of ultra-fanaticicsm and whose business was... to awaken the bitterest hatred against the citizens of sister states, by violent denunciation of their institutions; the transaction of public affairs was impeded by repeated efforts to usurp pairing the security of property in slaves, and reducing those States which held slaves to a condition of inferiority. Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government, which the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public comain acquired by all the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of thus rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party, thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States. In the meantime the African slaves had augmented in number from about 600,000 at the date of the adoption of the constitutional compact to upward of 4,000,000. In moral and social condition they had been elevated from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers, and supplied not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction. Under the supervision of a superior race, their labor had been so directed as not only to allow a gradual and marked amelioration of their own condition, but to convert hundreds of thousands of square miles of the wilderness into cultivated lands covered with a prosperous people; towns and cities had sprung into existence, and had rapidly increased in wealth and population under the social system of the South;... and the productions in the South of cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco, for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable had swollen to an amount which formed nearly three-fourths of the exports of the whole United States and had become absolutely necessary to the wants of civilized man. With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled, the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced.”
GAME. SET. MATCH.

This is for extra credit. It comes from a speech in Savannah on March 21st 1861 by Alexander Stephens, VP of the Confederacy.

” The (Confederate) Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions- African slavery as it exists among us- the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away...Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it- when the “Storm came and the wind blew, it fell.” Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth......It is the first government ever instituted upon principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many Governments have been founded upon the principles of certain classes; but the classes thus enslaved were of the same race, and in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. The negro by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material- the granite- then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is the best, not only for the superior but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed in conformity with the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances or to question them.”

I like to think of them both as leading liberals of their time.

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